Depthfinding for Prioritizing Strategy
Byline: Rodney EvansRunning a company within a larger economic system that values continual growth above all else makes prioritization a thorny challenge.
Leaders aren’t inherently wired to make tough trade-offs; any dip in productivity, efficiency, or revenue in the name of long-term stability or success feels impossible; and prioritizing in a business that’s unstable? Even harder.
On the one hand, how can you underfund a legacy business when you don’t know which new bets will pay off? On the other, how can you make a big enough investment in the future when you aren’t meeting revenue targets now? But also, how can you say no to any possible upshot when the stock price is in free fall, a disruptor is stealing market share, or a bigger technology company just swallowed your business model whole?
Whether riding the upswing of a growth cycle or facing the inevitable decay of a once-thriving business, prioritization is both essential and daunting. It breaks down when goals lack clarity, teams take on too much, or incentives and authority are misaligned. Add inertia or poor communication into the mix, and even the best-laid plans can unravel.
In boom cycles, overconfidence and chasing quick wins dilute focus; in bust cycles, fear-driven cuts and short-term thinking undermine long-term goals. Without a habit of ruthless prioritization, it’s hard for leaders to see meaningful returns—whether from the core business or bold bets. Trade-offs feel risky in the moment but are ultimately safer than slowly bleeding resources across too many small, inconsequential efforts.
Prioritization work with leadership teams can feel impossible—mystical, even. In these moments, having a map can be a lifeline.
Enter Depthfinding.
We created the Depthfinding framework, which is inspired by real oceanographic terms, to help leaders solve modern problems in modern ways.
Depthfinding is a tool that helps leaders understand their gnarliest challenges.
In today’s organizational age, it’s a leader’s job to constantly sense and notice where they’re either over-invested or under-invested in their organizations—a tall order if you can’t fully understand the environment in which you operate.
Depthfinding breaks down complex challenges and opportunities so patterns are easier to see, obstacles are easier to overcome, and small but impactful shifts are easier to test. Whenever you face a significant situation that feels frustrating, overwhelming, or just too hard to understand, use this simple tool to get clear on what’s happening and what to do about it in under 15 minutes.
Here’s how one leader used Depthfinding to define strategic priorities in a highly chaotic environment.
Let’s Go Depthfinding.
A client (let’s call him Peter) was working at a company with massive potential and an existential issue: A lack of focus and prioritization meant resources were spread too thin to deliver value at a time when the company needed to convince investors, partners, and customers of a viable future.
Despite the company’s lofty mission, its leadership struggled to commit to any strategy long enough to see results. As Peter put it:
“We operate like we’re Meta, running five million experiments. In reality, we’re a small company. We end up betting on everything—which means we’re not really betting on anything.”
A lack of performance in any particular area only increased the pressure to “try new things” while “doing more with less.” Employees felt the whiplash of changing directions, reranked priorities, and budget cuts weekly. Overwhelmed and confused, the workforce was frozen in indecision, and Peter was stuck in a cycle of firefighting and reactive decision-making.
From the outside, this looks like a typical strategy issue: What lane(s) should the organization choose?
A smart management consultant could hand you the answer in a PowerPoint deck. But as most leaders know, these situations are rarely that simple. The organization’s founding story, legacy core business, investor expectations, and tricky leadership dynamics contributed to the problem. Peter, new to the scene, scarcely knew where to begin.
Too often, leaders jump to action and address the most apparent aspects of a problem. But a short pause to investigate and map an issue can reveal what’s under the surface. I used Depthfinding to better understand Peter’s challenges and opportunities, zone by zone.
First, The Problem
From the Sky we see that Peter’s company has a storied legacy: early days of exponential growth, marquee partnerships, and a rockstar board. This meteoric rise was fueled by an undeniable mission and a massively underserved corner of the healthcare market. But a decade later, the healthcare market had grown increasingly fickle, with consumers demanding more personalization from a standardized solution. The market was changing weekly, creating a sense of urgency for seizing opportunities and responding on a dime.
In the Sunshine Zone, tools designed to address strategic prioritization existed but didn’t create sticky change:
Mission: Peter’s company had an inspiring, clarified mission. But without an explicit strategy and roadmap to bring it to life, it didn’t drive the business day to day.
OKRs: The leadership team spent cycles fiddling with OKRs, but they were used for demonstrating activity and holding others accountable rather than assessing whether the teams’ efforts were having the intended impact.
Without explicit aims and measures, leaders didn’t have a clear, shared way to filter priorities. The result was an organization without coherence—one where old ideas decayed without being adequately tested, new initiatives were tagged as urgent, and everything felt equally critical to righting the ship.
In the Twilight Zone, the lack of consistent prioritization made installing or maintaining routines impossible. Without reliable ways of executing, Peter spent his days swinging between crises and ideas to chase.
Bottlenecks in decision-making: At Peter’s senior level, he was surprised to learn all decisions funneled through the CEO, who often reacted to immediate pressures rather than aligning actions with long-term goals. This created delays and confusion, as the absence of clear decision rights held by other leaders and managers left teams waiting for direction that changed on a 24-hour cycle.
Ad hoc off-sites: As each new crisis emerged, Peter was pulled into an ad hoc, all-day session with the leadership team to brainstorm. These meetings were largely unstructured, resulting in talk of new ideas without consideration for how they would be prioritized against existing work.
Lack of governance for new initiatives: Without any clear workflow for proposing, funding, and chartering a new initiative, teams struggled with chaotic execution across scattered efforts. Unable to concentrate their energy on impactful actions and pulled in multiple directions, tremendous resources were wasted.
Show-and-tell meetings: Eager to show progress amidst chaos, teams presented their work to members of the leadership team in most meetings Peter attended. These meetings rarely led to decisions about whether the work should be continued, sunset, or turbo-boosted. Instead, they served as a forum for proof of effort and general feedback.
Ultimately, these factors fostered a reactive culture where firefighting, short-term thinking, and burnout became the norm. Instead of a shared vision, leadership decisions were driven by gut reactions and temporary whims.
The Midnight Zone revealed the true weight of the situation. Hidden beneath the surface, Peter’s experience in his new role left him doubting his decision to join.
Big job, high pressure: New to his leadership role, Peter felt the pressure of missed opportunities and poor execution. He’d always been a superstar and, for the first time, doubted his ability to rise above an existential challenge and have an impact.
Blame culture: In his prior role, Peter was close with his manager and peers. Mistakes were discussed openly and problems were solved together. Here, leaders who were unable to succeed looked for someone to blame, and it was usually each other, making it hard for Peter to trust his peers.
The volatility in the Midnight Zones of all company leaders added to the pressure Peter felt, leading to unhealthy FOMO and internal conflict between wanting to contribute to the company’s turnaround while worrying about his own career and ability to support his family.
With Depthfinding, Peter could see a more nuanced, zone-by-zone picture of his challenge.
The Solution
An organization’s zones don’t fail in isolation; they fail as a system. Working on each so they become resilient is the key to solving many cross-functional problems, including prioritizing strategy. Depthfinding makes sense of how the zones impact one another, so simple solutions shift the tide. It gets leaders and teams out of playing zone defense and into balancing action and monitoring consequences across every organizational depth.
After Depthfinding helped us understand the facets of Peter’s issue, we used it to decide what to do next.
Sky alignment: As a leadership team, determine which threats and opportunities they will stop responding to. Incubating too many MVPs to serve too many markets is sinking the company. It’s time to kill some darlings and choose a few viable paths to pursue adjacent to the core business.
Sunshine Zone improvements: The foundation for making hard trade-offs is an Essential Intent (or EI) statement that uses clear language and courageous simplicity, leaving no room for misinterpretation. Then, the team must articulate which strategic bets they’ll place to move them toward that EI, ruthlessly shed unrelated work in progress, and reallocate funding to give those bets a fighting chance.
Twilight Zone adjustments: Installing a consistent meeting rhythm for the leadership team is the place to start. This rhythm should include:
A quarterly strategy session to evolve the Essential Intent, outcomes, and trade-offs
A monthly “Sky meeting” to sense changes in the broader environment that may impact the strategy
A weekly meeting to review metrics, coordinate and unblock work, and maintain momentum
This leadership team lacks fundamentals like role definition, decision architecture, governance mechanisms, and evolved OKRs. But an operating rhythm to get the business focused and humming comes first.
Midnight Zone support: The most essential part of this pivot will be breaking leaders out of their individual patterns and toxic behaviors. But in a dysfunctional team, we don’t tackle this head-on as a group. We begin by building trust and transparency through good hygiene in the Twilight Zone, while offering leaders individual support (like external coaching or advice) so they can self-manage.
Depthfinding enables system solves
Depthfinding helps surface and unlock key leverage points in every zone (and points out how they’re interconnected), so systemic change feels like an exciting possibility rather than an impossible task. Doing Depthfinding side-by-side with Peter revealed the deep insecurity under the leadership team’s prioritization crisis. Though the root cause of their issues persists in the deepest zone (Midnight), they should start to address it from the top (Sky) before working down and building a culture capable of balancing ambition with focus. This is how a leadership team—and ultimately an organization—finds its power and regains momentum.
Depthfinding isn’t just about improving strategic prioritization; it’s about creating more durable organizations that can solve the next hundred challenges. What can it help you solve?
